blog de notas de juan freire

… Design Thinking originally offered the world of big business—which is defined by a culture of process efficiency—a whole new process that promised to deliver creativity. By packaging creativity within a process format, designers were able to expand their engagement, impact, and sales inside the corporate world. Companies were comfortable and welcoming to Design Thinking because it was packaged as a process.

There were many successes, but far too many more failures in this endeavor. Why? Companies absorbed the process of Design Thinking all to well, turning it into a linear, gated, by-the-book methodology that delivered, at best, incremental change and innovation. Call it N+1 innovation.

CEOs in particular, took to the process side of Design Thinking, implementing it like Six Sigma and other efficiency-based processes …

By formalizing the tacit values and behaviors of design, Design Thinking was able to move designers and the power of design from a focus on artifact and aesthetics within a narrow consumerist marketplace to the much wider social space of systems and society …

So what is Creative Intelligence, or CQ? Let me start by saying it is a concept in formation and I hope our conversation over the next months will give it a true, deep meaning. Above all, CQ is about abilities. I can call them literacies or fluencies. If you walk into one of Katie Salen’s Quest to Learn classes or a business strategy class at the Rotman School of Management, you can see people being taught behaviors that raise their CQ. You can see it in the military, corporations, and sports teams. It is about more than thinking, it is about learning by doing and learning how to do the new in an uncertain, ambiguous, complex space—our lives today.

At this point, I am defining Creative Intelligence as the ability to frame problems in new ways and to make original solutions. You can have a low or high ability to frame and solve problems, but these two capacities are key and they can be learned. I place CQ within the intellectual space of gaming, scenario planning, systems thinking and, of course, design thinking. It is a sociological approach in which creativity emerges from group activity, not a psychological approach of development stages and individual genius …

The customer journey map is an oriented graph that describes the journey of a user by representing the different touchpoints that characterize his interaction with the service.

In this kind of visualization, the interaction is described step by step as in the classical blueprint, but there is a stronger emphasis on some aspects as the flux of information and the physical devices involved. At the same time there is a higher level of synthesis than in the blueprint: the representation is simplified trough the loss of the redundant information and of the deepest details.

The customer journey map will plot touch points, service interactions and gestures of users having experienced a service. The method helps us understand the intentional and unintentional aspects of the customer journey. The map is humanised with personal insights, anecdotes and photos, using the users language, their successes and even failures as a very user-centred visualisation of the customer journey …

Journey mapping is a method of visually representing the actual and everyday user experience of a service. Mapping journeys is one of the simplest and most useful approaches to understand services, gaps in service, and to identify and design opportunities for improvement and innovation. The mapping, representation and analysis of a journey -an experience over time- has many functions and can be applied to service design and innovation at various stages.

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Compared to a lot of ‘social design’ currently being done, DESIS is interesting because of the emphasis it places on design as redesign (to quoteJan Michl). A key aspect to ‘amplifying’ is that the designers cannot claim to be the originators of the innovative ideas; they are rather the enhancers of innovations that neighbors, communities and community organizations have already come up with. The assumption is that the systems these non-designers have come up with could do with some redesign; that lending them some design expertise will make the systems easier and more effective, allowing them to be more readily taken up by people other than their originating champions…

The predominant image of design in the 21st century is that cliché of the empty conference room or studio—just after some feverish brainstorming extravaganza—plastered with Post-it notes … as if the act of design had suddenly morphed into some strange game of pin the Post-it on the mind map. How is it possible that the wonderfully complex process of design has devolved to the point that we now commonly represent it by the leftover artifacts of quickie ideation? Is that all there is?

I point the finger of blame squarely at Design Thinking, that aspiring little brother of design that has recently been getting all of the attention. The rise in Post-it portraiture has more or less mirrored the infiltration of Design Thinking into the boardroom. And as creativity becomes the lubricant of the innovation economy, what says it better than a crazy quilt of Post-its smeared to the wall? It’s no surprise that this version of ideation is particularly salient in a business context, where outputs are more often intangible strategies, financial instruments, services, and information flows. An array of Post-its does make a more vivid photo than a bunch of suits with their ties off ruminating. The Post-it portrait accomplishes the work of saying, “creativity and leaps of imagination happened here.” It puts the gloss on innovation.

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The problem is that in serving as a substitute for the whole of design, the Post-it represents only a small fraction of what makes design uniquely effective. It papers over the fact that ideation without materialization is not design. Designers discover as they turn ideas into thing (even when those things have no physical form). We gain true insight in the act of making a mark on a page or pushing pixels on the screen. We don’t need to over-hype those processes, but to ignore them means that we shortchange the practice of design.